Robert Evans (6:48)
Thank you, thank you. I haven't even gotten. We. We have not gotten to my final analysis of Peronism, where the closest thing I can compare it to is post short cultural revolution, 1970s era China. So this is about to get so much more unhitched. But a while back I was on Margaret's show, Cool people who did cool stuff to talk about the second Argentinian giant anarcho syndicalist uprising in about a span of four years, which was the giant anarchist rebellion in Patagonia in 1921. 1922. And this is the second one because the first one was the 1919 General Strike, which ends in an event called the Tragic Week, where everyone sort of gets killed by the military. But, you know, the fact that there's. There's two in different parts of the country, enormous anarcho syndicalist uprisings in a span of about 4 years is a demonstration of the fact that this is one of the most militant working classes in the world. And Any political movement that is trying to hold power in this country is going to have to deal with the fact that the Argentinian working class at any moment can, you know, if you're a factory owner, you can wake up one day and there's a black flag flying over your factories because your workers have seized it. And the sort of culmination of this, and the reason this is even still relevant today, is that like the last of what you would, I guess you could call like the classical 20th century revolution. So a line of uprising started with like the original formation of the workers councils in Russia in 1905, you know, and that continues to, like the occupation of the factories in Italy through the two red years in like 1918, 1919, like the anarchist parts of the Spanish revolution, like the revolutions in Hungaria and Alger, like, you know, all, like through 68, like the factory occupations in France and Italy. And like, all this whole, this whole lineage of like the thing that happens when you do revolution is workers occupy the factories and try to seize control of the country. The last one of those ever was in Argentina in 2001. Like everywhere else in the world, this shit was gone. And then randomly In Argentina in 2001, like, there's a giant one of these uprisings that is, you know, only really put down by a sort of left Peronist government agreeing to like, tell the IMF to fuck off, which was like, you know, a sort of seismic change in the political landscape. But all of this is to say that, okay, if you were a capitalist in Argentina and you have to deal with this, like, what? What do you do? And the answer is to create the most unhinged ideology the world has ever seen by uniting socialism and fascism under the single banner of Argentinian nationalist class collaboration. Which is the thing that makes no sense. But you have to understand, like, Paronism is. Oh God, Protism is simply the weirdest ideology ever. I promise we are going to get to the fun crypto stuff, but we have to unfortunately do this. We have to do our homework first. And part of this is so Juan Peron, the actual guy who his ideology is based off of, is an enormously popular president in like the late 40s and 50s until he gets overthrown by military coup. And to get a sense of again, like, how weird this guy is. Like, this is a guy who, when he comes into power, a bunch of the most famous Nazi war criminals. And like, not just, you know, obviously like, like the famous Nazis fleet Argentina. There's a whole meme about that, right But I mean, we're talking like guys from the Ustazi, like, guys, guys who literally did the holocaust by hand, like flee to Argentina during his administration and when a military coup overthrows him, they flee the country. So again, like the US backed military junta is less pro Nazi than this guy is. He is also personal friends with Che Guevara and considers like the Cuban revolution to be like part of his like revolutionary project. So a deeply, deeply weird, deeply weird guy. And the result of this is that, okay, so you have a military dictatorship through like the 50s and the 60s, right? And like the entire time this dictatorship, not the entire time, but most of the time this dictatorship is happening, right? The entire political spectrum sort of projects all of their political energy onto. We want Peron back. Because Peron is remembered as like the guy who like brought workers rights to the country and also like gave women the right to vote and also is remembered as like a stable nationalist, right wing government by the right. So like, everyone on like both sides of political spectrum project all of their political aspirations into the single figure of Peron, which works because he's not in the country. He's not, not there. So, you know, and because he's gone, you can project anything you want onto him. And this is to a large extent the origin of modern populism, right? Like the, you know, like modern populism is the projection of all grievances onto one guy and then having that guy come in, take power, do constant sort of semi political mobilization to like fix your issues. And one of the interesting threads here is that like the theoretical origin of left populism is very specifically Peronism. Because one of the theoreticians of like modern left populism, one of the most famous ones is my old nemesis, the Argentinian political philosopher Ernesto Lecloud, and his wife Chantel Bouff, who were like, they were like, you know, these, these people were like the theoretical forces behind a bunch of like the European left in the sort of Euro Communism era. And even up until like, like podemos in Spain, 2011. Like, these are the people who are the theoretical force behind so much like left electoral stuff in the last like 50 years. And it's all from Lecloud, who was a, who was a left Peronist. So all, all of, all the dots are going on the pin board. And while he's gone, he's this guy that like, from an American perspective, it's like imagine that like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump from 2016 were both the same guy and both Sides were just trying to get this one guy to come back to Argentina and like fix everything. So this creates like the left and right Peronists. And when Peron comes back in the 70s and like immediately gets elected president again, the right Peronist just, I mean, she literally starts slaughtering the left Peronist in the streets. And Peron like backs the right Peronists against the left. And you would think this would destroy left Peronism, but no, no, Left Peronism was in power in Argentina until like Malay's election, like a few years. It's so okay, so like, why would you still be a Left Peronus after Peron like had all your boys machine guns in the 70s? Part of the reason this works also is that he dies and his wife takes power and there's like another military coup. So, you know, he hasn't, he's not like in power long enough kind of for like the disenchantment to really set in. He's just, he's in power just long enough for people to remember it as like the break between the dictatorships. And at this point I can finally attempt to go, what is Peronis? After like how many minutes of like, oh God, I think I've gone over my 10 minute limit of what is Peronism? But okay, Peron's deal is this, right? Like, so, okay, like if you're a pronus, right, in a Peronist state, everyone is supposed to be equal before the power of the Argentinian state. And so if you're a leftist, you focus on the everyone is going to be equal part. And this means on the one hand, you know, there are, there are real substantive gains for the Argentinian working class that they didn't get under the, you know, the sort of previous administrations and under the junta, right. You know, you have like massive expansions of workers rights, nationalizations of a bunch of sectors of the economy. You have this like strategy of national development through like import substitution. There's, there's like a long strain of like feminist Peronism from, you know, his like, like him, him being the administration where women got the right to vote. On the other hand, if you're a fascist, you focus on the like before the power of the Argentinian state part, which means like permanent class collaboration. And this, this is the part of the deal that brings the right in is like the deal is that, okay, so you give the workers all this stuff and you really complicated patronage networks and you know, people have jobs and like they have a social safety net at least in theory. And the trade off is you will never ever again attempt to like occupy a factory or like drive these parasites who run your entire life out of power. And the second part of that is this like this hardline, unhinged right wing, like Argentinian nationalism, which is wielded against, for example, like Argentinian indigenous groups. And so I promise the comparison to the, to the long culture, 70s, long culture revolution, we've reached that point of it. So to understand like really what this is, right, it's an active counterinsurgency that is sort of. That is waged by the state and waged by a bunch of like, parts of the social sector to enfold this really dynamic and militant workers movement into the state in such a way that there can still be politics kind of, but it won't actually be a threat to the ruling class. And my sort of like closest thing to this is this very, very weird period in Chinese history between the end of the short culture revolution in 1969 and the death of Mao in 76, where the most unhinged parts of the Cultural Revolution are sort of over because Mao has set off. So 1967, Mao sets off this uprising in Shanghai. He does this deliberately as part of his strategy to gain power of the party. The problem is that control of Shanghai is no longer in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. Like, like the workers take the city. And this is a disaster because they've all been reading about the Paris Commun. I think about the Paris Communist that they had like direct elections of people. And there's a moment actually, like I found this, this moment of this transcript where Mao is talking to Joe Enlai and Joe Enlai is like, if we let these people do direct elections, like it's going to lead to anarchism. And Mao is like, oh shit, we have to stop this. So what happens is that he wheels together this baffling coalition of like student Red Guards and some like, loyal, like rebel workers factions, along with a bunch of like the remaining party bureaucracy and the military, which is a coalition comprised of everyone on every side of the Cultural Revolution, right? Like normally the Culture Revolution is broken down into very roughly, there are rebel factions and there are like government factions, right? And he's, he's pulled together a coalition of a bunch of elements of both of them with the explicit thing of we are going to end the revolution. And in the short run, what the, what this does is it leads to the back half of the Cultural Revolution that people don't talk about very much, which is instead of, like, everyone dying because there are rebels running around. Everyone's dying because the state is killing everyone to, like, bring everyone back under control. And that's what, like, most of the people who die in the Cultural Revolution are killed. Putting the whole thing down. If you want to try to understand, like, what Peronism is, right? It's this ideology of bringing together all of the different sort of disparate political factions in. In a moment, right? You're bringing together everyone from, like, the fascist on the right to, like, the socialists on the left, and you're bringing them into the banner of this one guy in the same. And the reason Mao is able to do this is because, like, he's Mao, right? Every single, like, faction on every side of the Cultural Revolution, whatever they're trying to do is justifying it in the name of, like, oh, this is what Mao wants. This is what Peron is doing, right? He's drawing together the entire political spectrum in a way that he can sort of stabilize power, take it away from, like, the junta and forge this permanent political coalition. And this results in, like, like, the sort of total dominance that this ideology has of Roger D. And politics means that, like, basically every election in Argentina until, like, Malay takes power is an election between the left and the right Peronists and. Okay, okay, I am so sorry. This finally is the end of my attempt to explain Peronism. And we're gonna go to ads. When we come back, I'm gonna actually do this interview that I've been promising. I am so sorry. Okay, we are back. Thank you so much for surviving this. This sort of brings us to, like, how he kind of takes power and how, you know, there's an economic crisis, there's, like, all this inflation. And so he comes in on, like, I don't know, we were talking about this beforehand, and we want to talk to you about this. Like, there's all these really weird parallels between this and the American election where it's like. Except. Except the inflation in Argentina is, like, real.
